Anthony Scaramucci describes stomping grapes, getting fired by Trump and overcoming adversity

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:30with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slipcovers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style. Whether you need a single chair, loveseat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Anabay has you covered. Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your home. Right now, you can shop up to 60 % off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washablesofas.com. Add a little to your life. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. You are listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair. In the last few days telling friends my next podcast guest was going to be Anthony Scaramucci, everybody had a reaction, a big one.

1:18How amazing, Ruthie. How did that happen, Ruthie? Lucky you, lucky us to listen to the two of you. When will it come out? In my career, I've been a chef and an author, and now a podcaster. In his career, Antony's been a president's communication director in the White House, a financial genius founding Sky Capital, and the host of the Rest is Politics U.S. podcast. We've both had our ups and downs. His may have been higher ups and maybe downer downs, but we're not here to compete. We're here to talk about food, party politics, food and party parties, food and family, food and memories. Up to date, I've only spent about 10 minutes with Antony, but it doesn't feel that way.

2:08For me, the night we met in the River Cafe was an immediate connection. I agree with my friends. How lucky am I to have him here today? Very sweet. How lucky am I to share stories? How lucky am I to kind of feel he's my friend? Well, I mean, the feeling is muted. It was a very, very sweet introduction. I didn't prepare an introduction, but I just wanted to know that I'm a super fan of yours. And the night that I had here was a very memorable one for me because I came with Jason Fox, who's a legend here for the SAS show. I did the American version called Special Forces. And so he dunked me in a car and he trapped me in the car and pushed me out of a helicopter, set me on fire.

2:50I mean, I don't know what the hell I was doing in that show. But anyway. And then he took you to the River Cafe. And then he took me to the River Cafe. Was that part of the dangerous risk-taking exercise? No, no, no. The River Cafe was the dessert after brutalizing me in the desert. We were out in the Wadi Rum Desert. The show's 10 days. At age 58, I made it through six of them. So I was proud of myself. But it was hard. What did you eat? Do you remember? No, terribly. I ate terribly. I lost probably. We'll go by killer. I lost 10 pounds. I don't know. Did you? Yeah. I bought probably six kilos.

3:24I mean, it was much. For six days. Shit on a shingle, corned beef on toast, boiled eggs. It was terrible. Franks and beans. They were giving you sort of SAS food rations for the day. Unlimited amount of water, but the food was terrible. What do you think you took away with your food? You know, it's a great question. I think when you go through something like that, and it's a minor thing, you get a lot more empathy for people that are actually out in that desert for 18 months, or they're out there serving the country, whether it's the UK or the US, and they're making a sacrifice to keep people safe.

4:02I mean, you get a lot more empathy. I think the other thing is I think your life's happiness comes from your expectation management. Tell me about expectation management. Well, if you're sleeping on a cot in 105-degree weather in a canvas tent, and you've got a little pillow this big and a little tiny, and you're freezing at night because the temperature goes from 105 to 48. These are Fahrenheit, of course. And you start freezing, you're like, you know, you learn to appreciate what you have. You learn to appreciate the comforts that you have. You know, I'm a big believer that life is about expectations, lower expectations, higher positivity, higher outcomes.

4:42I think it's also interesting that what you brought up is about empathy because we're all thinking about empathy. so much right now, especially since someone whose name I don't actually like to mention on the podcast, which is Elon Musk, said that liberals had too much empathy. I saw someone wrote something in response to that and said, you know, empathy is, he said, he wrote, I used to try and think what was evil. How do you define evil? And then he said, thinking about it, I think evil is when you have no empathy. and it turned out that it was signed by someone who was at Nuremberg you know, a judge at Nuremberg and it made me think about how empathy if we don't have empathy, what do we have?

5:25I think it's so crucial in life I think that's it you know, I mean, ultimately again, I guess I'm sharing a lot of my personal philosophy but I'll share it with you I get the most joy out of helping other people I think that's an axiom for most people I tell people, you know, I have an older brother that has experienced drug addiction in his life. He's gone in and out of rehab. He has figured out a way to stay sober by helping other people. He's a sponsor. He's a phone call away from someone that's depressed or in need of something or trying to help somebody stay off of whatever the drug is that they're addicted to.

6:06And I think when you're helping people, you're at your best. And if you're helping people, you're empathetic towards whatever their struggle is. And so to me, I think empathy is the whole thing. Empathy is. But a lot of these narcissists, frankly, they don't have a lot of empathy. There are people, political leaders and whatnot, that they objectify people. And they're just in their field of vision to either do a transaction that's favorable or unfavorable. And then they're immediately discarded. Like it's almost like a video game for a lot of these people, unfortunately. And the other one that you talk about is resilience.

6:40So we have empathy, but we also have resilience. And I've been through quite a lot in the last 10 years as old as I've had. And I thought, actually, if you can teach your children resilience, I think that's a great gift to have in life, that you have to be able to cave in as well. You have to be able to... Is it teachable? That's a good question. With my children, my observation, I guess, is that they're observing you. I can say things to them, but it's not going to really matter. It's your actions that are going to be things that happen. So when I got fired from the White House, which was a brutal time for me, Ruthie.

7:20I can imagine. If you're ever having a bad day and you're listening to this podcast, I want you to imagine my day on the 31st of July, 2017, when I got my ass fired from the White House, blown into Pennsylvania Avenue, skinned alive by the media, rolled in margarita salt. And I was on the Santa Monica promenade. I don't know if you've ever been out there at that open door promenade on 3rd and 4th Street. And my son at that time, he's 33 now, but he was 25 then. He put his arm around me and he said, Dad, are you going to be okay? It was the first time in my life where my son was parenting me as opposed to me parenting him.

7:58and I didn't really remember the feeling if I was going to be okay or not, but I remember what I said to him. I said, yeah, I'm going to be okay. Watch what I do with this. And I think it's very important for kids to see their parents get through things, whatever they may be, because then in their mind, they have space for their own failures. They have space for whatever they come up short on in their lives where they can say, okay, well, it happened to my mom or it happened to my dad and they were able to get through it. I can too. I find a lot of my very wealthy friends, they sanitize their life, Ruthie.

8:32They have a life that goes up and to the right. It's a perfect story. They made no bad decisions. I can't tell you the number of billionaire memoirs that I've read where I'm aghast at the perfection of all their choices. And then you look at their kids, and their kids are always eclipsed by all that. And it creates great insecurity. I just think it's super important for your children to see your fallibility, your mistakes, but also your grind, your ability to get up and get going after your mistakes. The resilience that you have now or that your son said to you, how are you going to cope with what you described as one of the worst imaginable situations of being fired?

9:15Tell me what that was like. First of all, before you went. First of all, I deserve to be fired. We can talk about that, too, so you have to be accountable. I should have never taken that job. I mean, this is a joke inside the family. My wife hates Trump. Tell us what the job was. Okay, so I was the White House communications director for 11 days. I mean, my wife hates Donald Trump like almost as much as Melania hates him. So, I mean, that's like way up here, right? And so, I mean, and she told me not to do it, and this is a real cautionary tale. I did it for ego-related reasons. I had grown up in a blue-collar family.

9:50I went to Tufts and Harvard Law School. I had started two successful businesses, sold one in my late 30s. And so I had some financial independence, and now I had a chance to work for the American president. And the funny thing about this is it's just a sign of my bad judgment or my immaturity. My mentor, who I totally respect, who's about 10 years older than me, was given a big job in the administration. And in December, he called me to say he wasn't taking it. And I said, what? And he said, no, I'm not going to take it. I spent enough time with Trump to know that we're like oil and water. And it's going to end badly for me if I take the job.

10:30And my ego's in the right place. And I'm not going to take the job. But that wasn't me, Ruthie. I took the job because my ego and my pride were driving me to the notion that I was going to work in the White House and help solve some problems and work on policy and help people. I mean, there was a little bit of idealism in there. But what there really was, was a lot of egocentrism. It was filling the self-narrative of me. And it was quite detrimental. I mean, Deirdre and I almost got divorced. I missed the birth of my fifth child. I was in, it still pains me to talk about it, but I'll share it here.

11:10James was born on July 24th. 2017. It was a Monday. I was with President Trump at the Boy Scouts event in West Virginia. Deirdre and I were fighting. She was due on August 8th or 9th, and she was delivering prematurely a couple of weeks early. And there's a 60-mile no-fly zone around Air Force One. So when Air Force One comes into an area, they have fighter planes, but they also have, you know, you can't go over Air Force One. You can't fly over that airspace. And so it was an impossibility to get back to New York. So I missed the birth of my son. So you have to imagine this week, I'm working for President Trump.

11:51It is not going well because there's a lot of internecine fighting in the White House. Trump is doing things that a lot of us are looking at saying, I don't really want to be involved with that. Fighting with him. Then I get fired, almost divorced, missed the birth of my son. So again, if you're having a bad weekend, if everybody's having a bad week, give me a call. I can tell you about a really bad week. But we should take it back to food. But I'm just saying to you. No, I agree. I know. I think, okay, tell me who eats better, the Democrats or the Republicans? I had one meal with Trump in the White House in the Blue Room.

12:25Okay, tell us what it's like to eat. Was it lunch or dinner? It was on a Wednesday. And you know how I know it was a Wednesday. I was only there for one Wednesday, Ruth. So I know it was a Wednesday. So I had beef Wellington. This son of a bitch is going to live to 500 years old. He eats well-done meat with ketchup. But the chef in the White House was making a beef Wellington, and he loved it. I think he had it, you know, I probably had like two out of five weekday nights. And so I had beef Wellington with him and a salad. And what else did you eat with him? You know, he likes, I mean, hamburgers on the campaign.

13:00Remember, I did nine months of campaigning with Trump, so it was a tremendous amount of fast food. You ever hear of Jimmy John's, the fast food place? So Jimmy John's is like a Midwestern sandwich shop. It's like all cold cuts. I mean, it's unbelievable that his arteries are still flowing. I mean, this guy eats McDonald's french fries, quarter pounders with cheese, Jimmy John's cold cuts. Does he seem to enjoy it? Does he sit there savoring it, or is it just getting the food down? No, no, no. He is a fast food maniac. Yeah, that's depressing. By the way, I mean, he would come off the plane. We were campaigning.

13:33He'd be like asking the cops where the Burger King was. And he'd be like, what do you want from Burger King? I'm like, I don't want anything from Burger King. I was campaigning with the Democrats. Well, here's the problem with the Democrats. She's a good cook, by the way. Kamala Harris is a great cook. She's a great cook. She's an incredibly nice person. She's a very smart person. But they did her a disservice because you can't, you have, whatever you think of Trump, At the time that she was running against him, he was arguably the most famous person in the world or one of the most famous people in the world.

14:07And she had 107 days to get to know the Americans and the Americans to get to know her. But also she was working with Joe Biden's team. She didn't have her own team. It wasn't like her office was based in Delaware. It wasn't based in Northern California. So this was a tremendous disadvantage that she had. Did you travel with her? So I went to Philadelphia with her for the debate. Did you have better meals with Trump or did you have better meals with Kamala? First of all, let me let everybody in on a dirty little secret because I'm a lifelong Republican. The Republicans have so much envy for the Democrats.

14:41Can I tell you why? Why? Okay, people are going to hate me for this, but the Democrats have the celebrities. The Democrats have the artists. The Democrats have the cool people in the culture. Okay, the Democrats have more fun. Their parties are better. The entertainment is better. The food is better. The Democrats have the culture, which is why Trump is pissed off at them all the time, which is why he, you know, decapitated the Kennedy Center, right? Because, you know, the Democrats look at him or the artists look at him like a knuckle-dragging ogre. And so, you know, he's going to, I guess, bruise them by taking over the Kennedy Center.

15:21And like, you know, he knocked out board members of the Kennedy Center. We're giving tens of millions of dollars of donations to the arts and to the performing arts in the country. And so he's not going to replace that money. He's not going to give anybody his money. That's not how he operates. So it's just, and by the way, you know, we're in the United Kingdom. You're not allowed to compare Trump to these fascists. So I'll try not to do that. But Mussolini did that, took over the arts. What happened to Mussolini in the end? People turned on him, right? So, I mean, you do enough crazy stuff over time that people will turn on you.

15:56And the message you're giving us all is there hope. Yeah. I mean, people are doing very crazy things in the United States right now. Listen to the boss. Listen to Bruce Springsteen. He'll tell you what they're doing. I was really proud of him because I think there's a lot of thought going on. It's how do we oppose? What is the opposition right now? You know, how do we express our frustration or disdain or anger for what our country is representing right now? So let me say something. This is important. This is original programming for me because I haven't really shared this with anybody. Think about my life experience.

16:39I was with Trump, and I was with Trump seeing something, and then I was manifesting and overlaying what I saw on President Trump. And so what did I see? I saw a group of people in our country, the United States, who were feeling economically left out. This is in 2016. 2016. In my neighborhood, I would describe the neighborhood I grew up in as economically aspirational. My father didn't make a lot of money, but he certainly thought his kids would go on to make some money and live the American dream. There was upward mobility. I would say that when I was campaigning with President Trump, and I was by accident with him because I was with Jeb Bush.

17:18Jeb Bush lost. He asked me to go work for him, and so I accepted. I mean, I made a lot of mistakes, but perhaps that was the first one. But what I saw is very relevant for 2025 because I'm sure it's happening here in the United Kingdom. there is a feeling of lower and middle income people that they're not getting ahead for their children. Forget about themselves for a minute. My dad, economically aspirational. Today, same person, they're feeling economically desperational. They don't have the same living standards that they once had in blue collar America. And by the way, when I was with the president, President Trump in 2016, I priced my dad's wages, and I told him that those wages are now down 26.5 % in real terms.

18:08That would put my family not in a small house but renting somewhere, possibly on an EBT or governmental assistance card. And so there's a real dilemma going on in the country. Now, he unfortunately has taken advantage of it for his own personal purposes, and those people are galvanized to him because they don't feel there are other alternatives. They haven't heard anything from the establishment politicians in 30 years. Those people's grandparents voted for Lyndon Johnson. They voted for Jack Kennedy. Maybe the great-grandparents voted for FDR. But the Democrats left them. The Republicans were never with them.

18:46And so Trump's populist message has galvanized a lot of people. And of course, you've had the Democrats make a lot of missteps in terms of the way they handled the last election. But but there's it would be remiss of me not to bring up the dilemma. Why are 50 percent of the United States voting with him? There were 40 of us that worked for him that begged people not to vote for him. I would say the disaffection and the separation, the feeling of being abandoned for the class of America who felt that the society they were promised, the expectations they thought they would have, were played to by a populist who did it through racism, through status.

19:30Division. Through division. Us versus them. So if they wanted that life, why did they go for Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton that said, I understand what you're talking about, but we'll do it through what you said, through empathy. We'll care about the people who don't have health care. We'll care about the people who are waiting at the border to have a new life. Instead of saying, these people do not deserve this. We are angry at these people. And that's what I think was manipulated by, is that it's a long conversation. But I think there were two ways to go. So there's the, and you worked for Kamala.

20:04You worked for the Democrats. I did. And I know there were so many problems. I worked for her. I helped her on the debate prep. I spent hours with her team in her debate preparation. I always just say this. Bernie was too far to the left for the U.S. The country is a primarily centrist country, in some ways center-right. Hillary Clinton would have been a very good president, but she unfortunately doesn't have the personality for our time. Maybe if she campaigned in a different era. This is a hiring decision that's based on popularity now. It's not a hiring decision that's based on qualifications.

20:43Yeah, and policies. Let's look at the policies. We're having a popularity contest versus sitting around in a boardroom trying to make a decision. Did you think she would win? I got that wrong. I thought she was going to win. I did too. And Alistair Campbell and I, Rory Stewart actually bet money on it. I traveled in enough areas of the swing states to see her momentum and her rallies were building. And I thought she was going to win. I was very surprised by the results. But remember, he won by like one and a half points. He only won by 300 ,000 votes. But the Democrats did something. And if Democrats are listening, you'd be really mad at me.

21:25but I did Gavin Newsom's podcast and I told him this. How do you let Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy out of your party? As an example, Lyndon Johnson would have never done that. OK, Joe Biden, and it turns out it was probably Joe Biden's staff now that we're learning about Joe Biden, but he gets disinvited from the electric vehicle summit. What are you guys doing? Lyndon Johnson had one of the best lines ever. Let's get all the elephants in the tent. This way, if they have to take a piss, they piss out of the tent. Don't let an elephant outside of the tent that could potentially piss into the tent.

21:55Elon and Bobby Kennedy really helped Donald Trump more than people realize. Imagine a state bottled olive oil chosen and bottled for the River Cafe arriving at your door every month. Our subscription is available for 6 or 12 months with each oil chosen personally by our head chefs and varying with each delivery. It's a perfect way to bring some River Cafe flavor into your home or to show someone you really care for them with a gift. Visit our website, shoptherivercafe.co.uk, to place your order now.

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23:19Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200 ,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50%, and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter. Park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. So I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. My mother never went to college. So I grew up in Port Washington, which is on Long Island.

23:59Some very wealthy areas there, but like in places like Greenwich or Port Washington, Great Neck, there are also blue-collar areas. I mean, there's places where you got to put the landscapers and the sheetrock people and the plumbers. And so my dad was a union guy. He was a crane operator in the town. So he spent 41 years as a construction worker, smoker, drinker, super hard guy. I'm not going to BS anybody. So he was very tough on us as kids. Two of you? You and your other? Three. I have an older brother and a younger sister. My mother was a cosmetologist. Okay. So when I go on TV and have my makeup, she will call me and tell me I've got the wrong color.

24:41Oh, I see. Your MAC number five is my, you know, cosmetology, like cosmetics. And so we really saw her on Saturdays because she was with bridal parties on Saturdays making them up. And she worked at a local nail salon and sold cosmetics and did makeup artists, basically. But those are my parents' jobs. super hard working, very tight, lots of tight financial situation, a lot of middle class upbringing. I would never dishonor my parents by telling them I grew up poor. I did not grow poor. We had a great middle class upbringing, but a small house, you know, and we had, you know, I mean, we had a little hallway kitchen, talking about this expansive, beautiful kitchen here.

25:26My mother had this little hallway kitchen and then off the kitchen, There was a little vestibule that had a round table that really could fit six, but we always had eight to ten people shoved into the table. Did you? Friends and family. Family, and I have a big—the neighbor I grew up in, I have about 12 cousins that grew up alongside of my brother and sister. So my grandmother was alive. She was a huge cook. I see. Took everything. Was she the first generation to come from Italy? First generation. Got to the U.S. in 1923. My other grandparents got to the U.S. a little earlier than that. But she was 18 in 1923.